The EPA’s Political Futility

On June 2, the Environmental Protection Agency is going to
announce new rules for existing coal-fired power plants, most
likely a 20 percent reduction in allowable carbon dioxide
emissions. The only way this will be possible will be by upgrading
almost all combustion units, and the ultimate cost of the upgrades
will make coal noncompetitive with much-less-expensive natural
gas-fired facilities.

The EPA’s proposed new greenhouse-gas regulations are a
campaign promise come true. In 2008, Senator Barack Obama announced
that, if elected, his climate policies would “necessarily
bankrupt” anyone who wanted to build a new coal-fired power
plant.

Public comments on EPA’s proposal to do just that closed
on May 9, and there is no chance that the president will renege
— or that this policy will have any detectable effect on
global temperature.

The EPA’s own model, ironically acronymed MAGICC,
estimates that its new policies will prevent a grand total of
0.018ºC in warming by 2100. Obviously, that’s not enough to
satisfy the steadily shrinking percentage of Americans who think
global warming is a serious problem.

MAGICC tells us that the futility of whatever Obama proposes for
existing plants will be statistically indistinguishable from making
sure that there are no new coal-fired ones. In fact, dropping the
carbon dioxide emissions from all sources of electrical generation
to zero would reduce warming by a grand total of 0.04ºC by
2100.

This is hardly going to stop the crescendo of global-warming
horror stories, perhaps best summarized by the government’s
recently released “National Assessment” of the effects
of climate change on our country.

For example, the assessment tells us that global warming will
increase mental illness in our nation’s cities. The obvious
implication is that people in Richmond are crazier than they are in
Washington, 100 miles to the north. Or that people must really be
loony in Miami.

But what about all the weird weather plaguing the country? What
the alarmists don’t tell you is that not since records were
kept in the 1860s have we have gone this long without a Category 3
hurricane’s crossing our shoreline. They omit that
there’s no evidence of an increase in weather-related damages
once you adjust for the fact that there are now more people with
more expensive stuff to hit. Even the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so often cited to
justify our futile policies, acknowledges that one.

The politics of scaring people to death over climate change are
probably more dangerous than the weather. And research suggests
that the more people read that some “scientists say”
the world is about to end, the less they believe them.

Chalk it up to apocalypse fatigue. By my best guess, global
warming is the eighth environmental Armageddon I have lived
through. Who even remembers that, according to some of our most
esteemed scientists, “acid rain” was going to cause an
“ecological silent spring”? Like so many global
catastrophes, it was a bit exaggerated.

You’d think the administration would see not just how
futile these policies are in addressing climate change but also how
costly they are politically. Some compelling analysis of polls
shows that the Republicans gained control of the House of
Representatives in the 2010 election because, under Democratic
leadership, it passed cap-and-trade, which the Senate wisely
stopped short of. In Australia, similar policies favoring
cap-and-trade cost the Liberal party its leader in 2009 and
subsequently sacked two Labour prime ministers, Keven Rudd and
Julia Gillard.

Is this really the road the administration wants to go down in
2014? If history is any guide, a pretty steep price will be paid on
Election Day — all for policies that will have no measurable
effect on climate change.